Questions Outweigh Answers In Shooting Spree at College

By ANTHONY DePALMA

Published: December 28, 1992

When his music changed, Wayne Lo changed, and in time two people lay dead, four others were wounded and a sheltering place had become a killing field.

As he sits in the Berkshire County House of Corrections in Massachusetts, charged with murder and assault with a deadly weapon in connection with a 20-minute rampage at Simon's Rock College in Great Barrington, Mass., only Mr. Lo knows what led him to turn away from the classical music he once loved and instead embrace the violent, discordant music known as hardcore, and a surly group of students who were equally entranced by it.

Only he knows how the same fingers that danced with such agility and emotion over the strings of a violin could, as the police say, have pressed the trigger of a semiautomatic assault rifle, shattering the campus silence and ripping through several lives. Searching for Why

Today, two weeks after the Dec. 14 shootings, the 300 teen-age students of Simon's Rock have gone home for the holidays. Workmen are replacing a shattered window and blood-stained carpet in the library. The college plans to reopen as scheduled on Jan. 24.

But questions still far outnumber answers about the reason such violence was committed, how the six victims were chosen and whether anything could have been done to prevent it.

Last week college officials spoke publicly for the first time about the shootings. They offered details about how tantalizingly close they had been to averting the rampage -- on the day of the shooting officials temporarily impounded a package sent to Mr. Lo that may have contained bullets -- but no answers to the haunting question why.

"I don't know what he was thinking and I don't know why he did what he did," said Bernard F. Rodgers Jr., vice president and dean of the college. "The temptation is almost irresistible to explain what happened by blaming someone, especially Wayne Lo. What's happening now is that he is being demonized in accounts that are presenting what essentially is a caricature of this boy."

The portrait of Mr. Lo that emerged after the shootings was of a tightly wound 18-year-old with a shaved head, an Asian-American whose calm exterior hid a secret Rambo. But as details about his life have come out, that simple sketch has had to be shaded by contradictory images. Scattered Details Of a Complex Life

As a high school student in Billings, Mont., Wayne Lo played first violin with the Billings Symphony Orchestra. He had a 3.56 grade-point average, starred on the basketball team and helped out in his parents' Chinese restaurant.

But for some reason this diligent student and gifted violinist became an angry, disaffected college sophomore who stopped taking violin lessons, only grunted at people he passed in the hallways and whom other students described as espousing racist views.

Several students agreed that his music, and the friends who went with it, offered the greatest insight into Wayne Lo.

His new circle of friends, the ones he increasingly spent time with over the past year, were known as the "hardcore group" because they listened to that type of music, a blend of heavy metal and punk rock. These students described as Mr. Lo's friends were on winter break and could not be reached, but others from the campus said they talked tough and sat apart from others.

"They were and are elitist," said Mishka Shubaly, a 15-year-old from Kingston, N.H., who said he knew Mr. Lo as a teammate on the Simon's Rock basketball team. "He held himself sort of above other people. A lot of it had to do with perfection."

Ian Lary, a 17-year-old freshman from Appleton, Me., said: "Certain people just felt uncomfortable with Wayne and his friends. People would come up to me and say we should get them off campus. A couple of his friends had fascist views."

Mr. Lary said Mr. Lo once wrote a class paper arguing that people with AIDS should be banished to Utah. Others said he was known to hate Jews, blacks and homosexuals, and to have contended that the Holocaust never happened.

Leila Kohler, who said she knew Mr. Lo from an English class and from spending time with him last spring while dating one of his best friends, also described him as holding his racist views.

But she also said Wayne Lo was known to play Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" from memory. "He was actually quite amazing when it came to playing the violin," she said. "It almost wiped away the fact that he was not a real human." Early Promise Of Excellence

Born in Tainan, Taiwan, to a career military officer and a music teacher, Mr. Lo showed all the signs of being a musical prodigy. When his father, Chia-Wei Lo, was transferred to a diplomatic post in Washington in 1981, the 7-year-old violinist played with the nearby Montgomery County Youth Orchestra.

The family returned to Taiwan in 1983 and then, in 1987, came back to the United States where the elder Mr. Lo, on the suggestion of a friend, opened the Great Wall restaurant in Billings. There, Wayne Lo's passion for the violin still burned, and at Billings Catholic Central High he did well in school and on the basketball court, despite his 5-foot, 4-inch, 135-pound frame.

In September 1991, Mr. Lo entered Simon's Rock College, an alternative school that in many ways seemed perfect for someone like him. The college was founded in 1966 in the belief that most high schools did not sufficiently challenge gifted students. It affiliated with Bard College in New York in 1979.

Simon's Rock attracts academically talented students as young as 14 years old who are ready to do college-level work years before they would have graduated from high school. About two-thirds of them spend two years at Simon's Rock, earning an associate's degree before transferring to other colleges with a wider variety of majors. Simon's Rock has a reputation for encouraging self discovery and comforting bright but young students as they come to terms with who they are.

But in this lively setting, Mr. Lo's life apparently somehow veered off course. Piecing together statements by college officials, students and the police produces an account of a fateful day two weeks ago for Wayne Lo. An Odd Package Arrives at Simon's Rock

On Monday morning, Dec. 14, exam week at Simon's Rock and one month to the day after Mr. Lo's 18th birthday, a United Parcel Service employee delivered a package for Mr. Lo. The receptionist who accepted it noticed it had come from a company in North Carolina called Classic Arms, and notified college officials.

Mr. Rodgers, the dean, concluded after an hour-long discussion with residence advisers that he had no authority to interfere with the delivery, but should try to find out what was inside. The package was returned to the mail room, where Mr. Lo picked it up.

The advisers for Mr. Lo's dormitory, Trinka Robinson and her husband, Floyd, went to the student's room and asked to see the contents of the package. Students said Mr. Lo had earlier argued with Mrs. Robinson because he had violated college policies about remaining in the dormitory during the Thanksgiving break. College officials said he had contracted chicken pox just before the holiday and did not fly home.

On this day, Mr. Lo initially refused Mrs. Robinson's request, but finally displayed what he said had been inside the package: ammunition magazines that appeared to be empty, a plastic rifle stock and an empty cartridge box. Mr. Lo said the cartridge box was a Christmas present for his father and the other items were his; he said he had a semiautomatic rifle at home in Billings that he used for target practice.

Mr. Lo then attended a previously scheduled meeting with Mr. Rodgers. They talked about the package and the college's rules prohibiting firearms on campus. Mr. Rodgers later said that Mr. Lo was "calm, coherent, logical and open." They discussed his plans to apply to transfer to a four-year college next fall.

Shortly after leaving Mr. Rodgers's office, Mr. Lo got into a taxi for the 20-mile ride north to Dave's Sporting Goods in Pittsfield, where, the police say, he bought an assault rifle, but no ammunition.

A Chinese-made SKS semiautomatic assault rifle can be bought for $150. Massachusetts has strict laws governing the sale of such weapons; a resident must obtain a firearms identification card from the local police and wait 30 days for a background check.

But a loophole allows an out-of-state buyer to bypass Massachusetts restrictions, put down cash on a counter and buy an assault rifle as easily as one can buy a personal computer.

Mr. Lo returned to campus in time to take a 3 P.M. exam. That night he attended a scheduled dormitory meeting with Floyd Robinson and other students. As Mr. Lo was in the meeting, college officials say, Trinka Robinson was warned by an anonymous telephone caller that Mr. Lo had threatened to kill her and her husband the next day.

She immediately called college officials, and as they discussed what to do, the shooting began. Shots Ring Out In the Night

When Bruce Beavers lost his job as a development counselor a year ago, his wife, Teresa, wanted to pitch in. She started a job as a security officer at Simon's Rock three months ago. On the night of Dec. 14, she was stationed at the main entrance to campus in the guard shack. It was cold and isolated, but it had a phone, and with the main road quiet and students busy studying, she and her husband had a chance to chat.

At about 10:20, Mrs. Beavers, who is 40, told her husband to hold on, because someone was approaching the shack. "There's a kid out here with a gun," she told him calmly. In the Berkshires, hunters are not unusual.

Mr. Beavers was at home in Lee, Mass., watching TV with the couple's four children. "Then she put down the phone," he recalled.

A few moments later, "I heard her say, "Oh my God, no!' " Mr. Beavers said. "Then I heard a crash, an explosion, and I heard her screaming."

The police say Mr. Lo had squeezed the assault rifle trigger twice, firing two bullets that passed through Mrs. Beavers's abdomen and smashed into the guard shack wall. She is now listed in serious but stable condition at Fairview Hospital in Great Barrington.

While his wife lay wounded, Mr. Beavers hung up and called the police.

According to police reports, Mr. Lo next turned on a Ford Festiva that had pulled up to the security shack. The driver was Nacunan Saez, a 37-year-old professor of Spanish from Argentina who spoke four languages and liked to take 50-mile bicycle rides. Professor Saez had never taught Mr. Lo. The gunman pulled the trigger again and a bullet hit Professor Saez in the side of the head, the police say. The teacher drove his car off the road, into the snow, and died there.

The police say the gunman then headed toward the Simon's Rock library, where students who had heard the first shots were wondering what had happened.

There, they say, he fatally shot Galen Gibson, an 18-year-old apprentice poet and lover of theater from Gloucester, Mass., and wounded Thomas McElderry, 19, of New York Mills, Minn..

His next destination was a dormitory, where Joshua A. Faber, 15, of Pittsford, N.Y., had been watching Monday Night Football in a television room in the basement.

Mr. Faber, in a telephone interview from his home, said he did not think Mr. Lo planned to shoot him. He knew Mr. Lo only slightly, he said, and had on occasion played football with him after class.

When he and some friends came upstairs to the lobby at halftime, they were told about the gunfire.

"At first we dismissed it as a prank," Mr. Faber said.

But as Mr. Faber and another student, Matthew Lee David of Montclair, N.J., stood in the lobby, the police say, they were in Mr. Lo's line of fire.

"Suddenly I felt an explosion and I realized I had been shot," Mr. Faber said. "I thought I'd better get away from the area as quickly as possible. I hopped up the steps and a friend helped me into the residence director's room."

He was shot through both thighs and his left calf. His friends wrapped a tourniquet around his right thigh and applied pressure to the left while they waited for an ambulance. Mr. David was also wounded. Questions Asked But Not Answered

It all took less than 20 minutes. When the shooting stopped, the police reports say, Mr. Lo went to the student union building and contacted the police.

He then laid down his rifle, put up his hands and walked out into the night, where police officers were waiting for him.

The next morning he was brought before a judge at Great Barrington District Court to hear the charges against him read. He wore a sweatshirt embellished with four words that are the name of a hardcore band whose songs had replaced Vivaldi's compositions in Mr. Lo's life. The name of the band is Sick of It All.

Since being taken into police custody, Mr. Lo has said nothing publicly about the shootings. He is being held without bail while a grand jury reviews the charges against him.

The district attorney's office will not comment, and neither will Mr. Lo's lawyer, Janet Kenton-Walker of Amherst, Mass. Distraught college officials have found no note or other explanation for the horror and are left to anguish over what they could have done differently.

In Billings, the young man's mother, Lin-Lin Lo, struggles to understand why the music changed.

"These things that happened I still cannot figure out," she said by telephone Saturday. "Wayne is a fine boy, a lovely boy. He cares about family, he cares about friends. I really don't understand what happened."

Photos: Wayne Lo being escorted to his arraignment last week in Great Barrington, Mass., where he was charged with murder and assault with a deadly weapon as part of a 20-minute rampage at Simon's Rock College. Two people were killed and four were wounded. (Alan E. Solomon for The New York Times); Flowers, candles and other items have been left outside the entrance to the Simon's Rock College library. Two students were shot at the library. (Associated Press)(pg. B10)